Bailout at the Local Bar

UNTIL early last month, Debra Fierro drove each day from her home in Charleston, near the southern tip of Staten Island, and parked her white S.U.V. in front of Rubyfruit Bar and Grill, the Hudson Street tavern that she opened in 1994. Ms. Fierro, 53, dressed in running clothes, usually arrived around noon and took inventory for that night’s dinner.

What came next was exercise for the mind as much as the body, a flight from business and bills and unpaid rent, an exercise in forgetting.

A marathon runner, Ms. Fierro rolled up the sleeves of her T-shirt and jogged down to Battery Park and back, ending up at the Printing House Fitness and Squash Club, a few blocks away from her restaurant. There she showered and changed into her work attire: typically jeans and an untucked collared shirt, maybe a vest.

For years, Ms. Fierro’s early afternoon jaunt fit into a larger routine: the day-to-day churnings of a business that was not only getting along but developing a reputation as one of the city’s most popular lesbian bars.

“Who hadn’t heard of it?” asked a woman named Lassie, who, one night this summer, when Rubyfruit’s fate was uncertain, could be found leaning against the bar, chatting with the bartender in the soft red glow of the lights. In the mid-1990s, this woman used to make weekend pilgrimages to Rubyfruit from her home in Northampton, Mass. “Everyone had heard of it,” she added. “Back then.”

Since then — a vague period — Rubyfruit has become one of those institutions that, like aging athletes, have outlived their glory days and taken up residence in their own long shadows.

The economic turmoil that has rocked the city, the nation and the world in recent months has defined Ms. Fierro’s reality for the past two years. Rubyfruit is a portrait in miniature of these large-scale troubles, one of countless unassuming businesses around the city being battered by forces beyond their control and sometimes deeply mysterious to them.

“I had this formula that worked,” Ms. Fierro said. “But then it didn’t work anymore.”

A Play Without the Props

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I had this formula that worked, said Debra Fierro, the owner of Rubyfruit Bar and Grill. But then it didnt work anymore.Credit
Michelle V. Agins/The New York Times

For about 12 years, Rubyfruit got along, never making much money but resting comfortably on its reputation. In recent years, though, Ms. Fierro returned from her daily run to a barrage of reminders that, in her mind, amounted to warnings of structural fragility, as if the place might collapse any day.

Until two years ago, she began each day with $300 in the cash register. Now, she started with $30. If someone paid with a large bill and needed change, an employee had to run to an A.T.M., an embarrassing display, Ms. Fierro knew.

She once kept tanks of soda under the bar, but recently, when a customer ordered a rum and Coke, a bartender would grab the soda from the fridge. When the soda ran out, an employee would run around the corner and buy another case.

These small tasks added up to a wearying, ragtag performance, like a play being presented without the necessary props.

“You’d never know that this business was so depressed if you walked in, because everything looks the same,” said Ms. Fierro, who wears her blond hair neatly parted on the side and reaching just to her shoulders. “But I know there’s no ice machine down there; there’s no soda in the guns.”

This month, the rent rose to $11,330 from $6,500 in 1994. Her clientele had largely passed through its nightlife phase. As one longtime customer, Alisa Wiles, said recently, “A lot of the lesbian crew moved out to Brooklyn.” Or as Jillian Bradley, a 70-year-old veteran of the lesbian nightlife scene who owns a downtown escort service, put it, “Those girls are now dead or on blood-pressure medication.”

Whatever the reasons, Ms. Fierro couldn’t pay the rent, and during Gay Pride Week in late June, as a friend distributed T-shirts and baseball caps stitched with the words “Rubyfruit — Last Call” to a moist-eyed Hudson Street crowd, Ms. Fierro told them she had no choice but to close it down.

Bracing for a Bleak Summer

A few weeks later, Ms. Fierro changed her mind. More practical thinking gave way to her sheer desire to keep Rubyfruit open, bolstered by support from neighbors and patrons. The bar stayed open and Ms. Fierro, making no promises, braced for a bleak summer.

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Antonio Corona: Antonio gets paid, the bars owner said. I have to make sure he gets paid.Credit
Michelle V. Agins/The New York Times

Through July and August, her employees came to work not knowing whether Rubyfruit would be around for their next shift. In addition to Ms. Fierro, those employees included a few full-timers who oversaw the ranks of bartenders, servers and cooks — workers who mostly split their time between Rubyfruit and other tasks, among them D.J. gigs, tending other bars and artistic pursuits.

The money crunch was nowhere more evident than in its effects on two of the bar’s most dedicated workers, who for the past two years have taken almost no pay.

One is Annette Marino, 63, who lives with her cat in Chelsea and relies mainly on Social Security. “As long as I have money for cat food and cigarettes, I’m fine,” Ms. Marino said. “It stops me from doing some things I’d like to do. But you know, we’re here, the bar’s still open, and that’s what counts.”

The other worker is a woman named Miriam, who lives in Clifton, N.J., and declined to give her last name because some friends and relatives do not know she is gay. She takes no salary at all.

Not all of the employees, though, can afford to be on the no-payment plan; they include Antonio Corona, a 49-year-old Mexican.

When Ms. Fierro told Mr. Corona of the bar’s imminent closing, he said he would follow her wherever she went — to New Jersey, if it came to that.

Mr. Corona was working at a Midtown restaurant during Rubyfruit’s early days. He speaks little English, but his brother-in-law helped get him a job at Rubyfruit as a dishwasher. “Look, they can’t pronounce your first name,” the brother-in-law advised. “Just tell them to call you Antonio.”

More than a decade has passed since then, and during those years, Mr. Corona rose from a dishwasher to a cook. When Alexandra Fernandez, Ms. Fierro’s partner, learned one recent afternoon that Mr. Corona’s first name was, in fact, Cosme, she ran it past Ms. Fierro.

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Annette Marino, left, was working for almost no pay. As long as I have money for cat food and cigarettes, Im fine, she said. Stacy Ledwith, Right, a Rubyfruit D.J. and bartender, brokered a deal that might rescue the bar.Credit
Michelle V. Agins/The New York Times

“He’s not Antonio!” Ms. Fernandez announced.

“What’s his name?” Ms. Fierro asked.

“It’s not even Antonio.”

“You want me to call him something else?”

“Cosme,” Ms. Fernandez replied.

“Cosme?” Ms. Fierro asked, perplexed.

“That’s his name.”

Ms. Fierro paused. “Should I call him Cosme?”

“It might not be comfortable at this point,” Ms. Fernandez admitted.

A Fine and Its Aftermath

After passing through Rubyfruit’s front door, a visitor can walk upstairs to the bar or downstairs to Rita Mae’s, the restaurant portion of the establishment. Wednesday nights found Rita Mae’s lively with song, customers and employees belting out show tunes and standards accompanied by a charmingly out-of-tune piano.

But one night in August, as the music played, an inspector from the city’s Department of Health and Mental Hygiene stopped in, and finding that the bar’s health department certificate had expired in June, imposed a $1,000 fine.

Two days later, at 3:45, Ms. Fierro, Ms. Marino and Miriam climbed into Miriam’s car, and the three women, fearing the inspector’s return and additional fines, set about to renew the health department certificate. “We’ve got 45 minutes,” Ms. Marino announced.

Usually, such trips are a pleasant ritual for the women, though they are also a reflection of Rubyfruit’s financial difficulties. Often, the women go to Western Beef, a supermarket on 16th Street, and load steaks and chicken into the trunk of the car. Or they make their way to Jetro, a warehouse in Windsor Terrace, Brooklyn, in the shadow of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, where swarms of mostly male restaurant owners push around orange metal carts stacked high with wholesale food items.

On this day, though, the three women were headed downtown to the health department. At one point, frustrated by the Friday afternoon traffic, Ms. Fierro jumped out of the car, papers in hand, to make a run for it. But after running about 20 blocks, she changed her mind.

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Annetta Budhu is the new investor. I said to myself, I have the means to do something. Credit
Michelle V. Agins/The New York Times

“There was a lot of traffic on the sidewalk,” Ms. Fierro said, panting as she climbed back into the back seat. When the three women arrived at the building on John Street that houses offices for a number of city agencies, including the health department, Ms. Fierro sprinted again, to the elevator that would take her to the 11th floor.

Ms. Fierro had arranged to meet Jimmy Baig, a former health department inspector who now works as a consultant helping business owners pay fines and deal with violations and license renewals. Mr. Baig was waiting near the health department window, looking at the clock. It was 4:30, closing time for the office.

“Why did you wait till the last minute?” he asked. A minute later, after thinking it over, a female employee behind the glass reluctantly agreed to process the paperwork. Ms. Fierro grumbled a good-humored complaint about the fines. The clerk shrugged.

“The city needs money,” she said.

“They think they’re the only people who need money?” Mr. Baig countered.

“In this climate, you’d think they’d let you pay it off little by little,” Ms. Fierro said to Mr. Baig. “But it’s so unforgiving.”

September began as usual for Ms. Fierro, with worries about money tempered only by her chronic good cheer. Suddenly, though, her luck changed.

Stacy Ledwith, a Rubyfruit D.J. and bartender with buzzed dark hair and a high, scratchy voice, arranged for Ms. Fierro to meet with a woman who Ms. Ledwith thought could help Rubyfruit. The woman, a wealthy financial consultant from Guyana who lives in Greenwich Village, was Annetta Budhu, and she had occasionally visited Rubyfruit over the years.

“I happen to be a prominent gay woman,” Ms. Budhu said one day recently. “I said to myself, ‘I have the means to do something, and I’m going to save this.’ ”

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Rubyfruits out-of-tune piano was auctioned off, along with dishes and a cash register.Credit
Michelle V. Agins/The New York Times

Within days, Ms. Budhu had agreed to join Ms. Fierro as a partner, laying out a plan, and the money, for Rubyfruit’s physical and philosophical transformation. “It’s going to be very Zen,” Ms. Budhu said, “a very upscale lesbian bar, a women’s lounge.”

Ms. Fierro was hugely relieved. “This place was a sinking ship with so many holes that couldn’t be plugged up fast enough,” she said. “And then someone just threw a lifeboat. No, somebody drove by in a yacht.”

The new version of the bar, to be called R.F. Lounge, would be fashionable in ways Rubyfruit was not, offering high tea, tapas, wireless Internet, fine wines and beer on tap. The bar closed for renovations in September and is scheduled to reopen in early December with a black-tie event.

Although many in the restaurant business live hand to mouth and cannot go for long without a job, nearly all of Ms. Fierro’s employees have said they will return, and in the interim will either seek shifts elsewhere or take a vacation.

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On a Sunday evening, the night before Rubyfruit shut down for renovations, Ms. Fierro held a party. By early evening, the place was filled with young women dancing and kissing. It was a striking change from the usual mellowness and the spare, slightly older crowd the space usually accommodated. As music pulsed, Ms. Ledwith stood on the bar and poured orange-flavored vodka into the open mouths of young women who, with their necks craned and tilted in expectation, resembled a cluster of chic baby birds.

An evening a month earlier, however — when the bar’s uncertain future did not warrant such celebration — perhaps gave a better sense of the old Rubyfruit, the one Ms. Fierro and her employees had worked so hard to save.

A few women in their 50s sat at the bar and, after a drink, began to chat with one another. It was the final night of the Democratic National Convention, when Senator Barack Obama accepted his party’s nomination for president, and a large screen was rolled down from the ceiling. Because no employee was tall enough to turn on the ceiling-mounted projector, a large rainbow flag was retrieved from a corner office, and a worker jabbed the staff of the flag toward the ceiling in search of the “on” button.

Patricia Avallone, a 60-year-old artist and former art teacher who moved to the neighborhood in 1979, was sitting at the far end of the bar. “I came to the Village for the artists, the poets, the cafes,” she said with faint melancholy.

She wondered aloud if the city was changing, or if she was the one who had changed. She had heard of Rubyfruit’s financial difficulties, and yet the place endured, which was why she continued to come in, for a single drink, early in the evening, before going home.

“As I got older,” she said, “everything was taken away, the sweet stuff. But this, it’s like a little chapel.”